Kathmandu, May 14Attorney General Agni Prasad Kharel said that his administration was facing a ccorridorenge to deal with government cases as their number rose by 65 per cent in final five years.
Kharel was addressing a press conference at his office nowadays.AG Kharel said his office was in instant need of 245 additional government attorneys to handle the heavy workload.Kharel said recent reforms initiated by his office, specificly the degrees to protect government witnesses and to supply allowance to them on the day they have to visit courts to record their statements, had helped the Office of the Attorney General increase its success rate.He also said that in measure cases the provisions of continual hearing had also helped increase the percentage of success in government cases.We have introduced these degrees to increase success rate in government cases mainly because in most of the cases we found that the victims who lodged FIRs and the government witnesses turned hostile at a later stage of cases,& Kharel said and added that continual hearing helped avoid those elements that intimidated or enticed victims to become hostile in the court.
&In serious cases, we are trying to record statements of the government witnesses the same day the accused are produced in the court.
This shall lessen chances of intimidation against the government witnesses,& he argued.AG Kharel said he had launched efforts to monitor jails and detention centres to endegree that those facilities comply with legal degrees and respect the rights of detainees and inmates.Kharel said that he drew the attention of the authority after he found the jail in Pyuthan crowded.
He also said that every jail had at least one juvenile kept along with adult prisoners.Kharel also pointed out that existing laws did much address the issue of compensation to rape victims if an accused died in course of trial.Hence, he had forwarded a proposal to the Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs recommending it to make essential amendments to the law so that a rape victim could be compensated from the property of the accused, in an event of his/her death during trial.